Last Thursday, 2017-08-24, was interesting. I was programming away when, as often occurs in the mid-afternoon here in the summer, thunderheads boiled up above the Jura, the sky darkened, and before long a full-on thunderboomer complete with high winds, torrential rain, and plenty of flashes and bangs was underway.
Then, flash, bang! When you perceive them at exactly the same time, it's never a good sign. Instantaneously, the auxiliary monitor on my development machine emitted a crack and went black. The UPS units all went on battery, but quickly came back on line. I suspect the event they detected was not a power outage but a transient due to the lightning strike. After about five seconds, the monitor lit back up as if nothing had happened.
So far, so good. Further along, not so good. The phone next to the computer, which is connected to Fourmilab's Alcatel OmniPCX phone central was completely dead: even the LCD display was blank. All of the other phones connected to the central were equally hors de combat. The main Fourmilab fibre optic connection to the Internet wasn't perturbed at all, but the backup Swisscom ADSL connection was dead, and its router responded by butting in to new connections and diverting them to its "landing page" until I pulled the plug.
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